Reading Time: 9 minutes

You may have heard about Roam Research as the hot new note-taking app, which it certainly is right now. I’m using it and I love it — but why? Let’s dive in.

Structured organization vs fluid information

At its core, Roam is yet another note taking app. You type stuff in and it saves it. However, the core organizational structure of Roam is one of the big things that sets it apart.

In Evernote, you have Stacks, with Notebooks, with notes. Notion is a bit more fluid, but you still have to put things in a specific place. This is good for a lot of data, but not everything.

Suppose you have lunch with your friend Steve, he shows you a couple of great new apps on his phone, tells you about a book he’s reading, and gives you some advice on the next bike you should buy. If you want to put that in Evernote, where does it go?

In theory, you’d put the app info in a phone-related notebook, the book info in your “stuff to read” note, and the bike tips in your “outdoors” notebook. Right? Or maybe just put it in a note called “lunch with Steve”, list the items, and try to get back to them later. Either way, no single location is perfect, and any of them run the risk of getting buried under newer items.

Roam solves this by not making you put the info in any pre-built slot, but just adding it organically. We’ll talk more about this example in a bit.

Daily notes

One thing that Roam does that is a bit unorthodox, but brilliant, is automatically create a new “daily note” for you each day. When you start Roam up each day, there is a blank canvas waiting for you to fill (unless you pre-loaded reminders for today, which we’ll hit in a bit).

Using our example of the lunch with Steve, you could just jot down some notes on your daily note about what happened.

So that’s good, but it’s really no different than just putting that info into Evernote or Notion or whatever. Here’s where it gets interesting…

It’s easy to make new pages or links

With Roam, you can turn any text into a link by just putting brackets (like [[this]]) around the text. Let’s do that with our note about Steve:

That’s better, but still not super useful. Most apps can do links. The next piece is Roam’s main magic.

Bidirectional links

When we added those brackets to that text, one of two things happened:

• If there was already a page for any of those words, it linked to that existing page.
• If there was not yet a page for them, it created one.

That’s pretty handy, but what it also did was create a link on that new page back to this conversation. Suppose we go into the Redline Monocog page to add more info, we’ll see the link back to this conversation. The bike info lives on this page now, and can be connected to other bike stuff if you want, but we’ll always be able to see that it came from this conversation with Steve.

This can get super helpful at times. I recently started reading Essentialism, and came across a part that was really familiar to me, to the point where I thought perhaps I had read the book years ago and forgot about it. However, by pulling up my Roam notes on the book (which I didn’t even remember that I had), I scrolled down to the linked references section and I saw this line:

There it is! I’m not crazy after all. I knew that one line because of a luncheon I went to back in February where the speaker mentioned that line, I jotted it into my notepad, and put it into Roam later that day. Perfect.

Bidirectional links are fully automatic, and crazy useful, and you’ll see them weaved throughout the rest of this article.

Slash commands

Before we get too much further, we should talk a bit about slash commands. Anywhere in Roam you can type a slash and you’ll have the option to insert a lot of neat things. I find a few of them to be very useful, but all have their purpose:

• /Current Time is one I’m using a lot lately. As I’m working through my date, I’ll add a quick /Current Time to a new line and then type what I wanted to save.
• For things that tie to a future or past date, the /Date Picker command is quite helpful too. When I said early on that a daily page might already have some content on it, this is what I was referring to. You can mention a future date in your notes, and when that day arrives you’ll see the linked reference to today sitting on it. When we get into tasks shortly you’ll see how this can be very powerful.
• /Today and /Tomorrow can be pretty helpful too.

There are many more slash options in there, so go check them out for yourself.

Block references and embeds

While bidirectional links make it seem like everything is about pages, Roam is actually structured down to the block level. Every bullet you write can be referenced on another page.

In general, with any system, it’s wise to not save the same info in two places. If you can put it one place and reference it from others, this avoids the chance of you having one of them become inaccurate.

To add a block reference to a page, you can just CTRL-drag it from the sidebar (which we’ll talk about shortly), or type a double parenthesis and start typing the next of that block.

For example, suppose I finally download Brain.fm and want to note that in my daily notes. I might just mention that Steve suggested it to me, but I could actually just pull that text over. If I pull that block into the daily notes (or any page), it will look like this; you’ll see that the text is fully underlined so that you know it’s a reference.

When you pull in a block, it also puts a small number to the side of the block in the original note so you can see where it was used. This can be useful for many types of study. For example, I use it when I reference a particular line of scripture, so when I pull up that chapter later I can see the places where I mentioned that verse before.

Here you can see a faint “1” to the right of Romans 1:4. When I click it, it opens the reference in the sidebar so I can see where I mentioned it in the past.

(more about the sidebar to come)

Tasks

Roam isn’t the perfect place to put your tasks, but it can be quite powerful. I use it for my personal tasks, simply because Roam is where I spend my time. Why set up my tasks elsewhere if I can just have everything in one place?

There are two main ways you can carve this out, and I do some of each.

You can create a “projects” page, and then a page for each of your projects in there. On each project, write out a list of tasks. When writing text, just type /TODO or press CTRL-Enter to turn the text into a task. If you add a future date to the task, it will show up in the linked references for that future date so you’ll remember that the task needs to be done.

One of those project pages might look something like this:

I’ve set up a bunch of project-based tasks, but lately I’m finding more value from quick tasks inline. When I need to remember to do something later, I just drop it in where I am, date it for the future, and it’ll show up then. Back to the example with Steve, I might want to remember to visit the bike shop on Saturday, so I’ll drop in a quick task for that.

With either of these systems, given how Roam is set up, there is a chance that some tasks may slip through the cracks. I have a few solutions for that, which I’ve outlined in this video:

Filters

As you saw in that tasks video, if you watched it, filters can be a great way to sort through linked references on a page. If you reference a particular page over and over, the list of linked references on that page can become long enough to be overwhelming and useless.

However, by clicking the filter icon near the top right of the linked references, you can filter things in and out of your view. For a bit more on this, go back and watch the tasks video above if you haven’t already and you’ll see what I mean.

Sidebar

I’ve mentioned the sidebar a few times in this post, as it’s a crazy useful (yet very simple) feature of Roam. In short, it allows you to essentially open two pages at once; one in the main view and one in the sidebar, like this:

The pages in the sidebar are fully interactive, but with a few small differences.

• You can’t filter anything on them.
• You can have a bunch open over there, stacked on top of one another.

When you’re working on info that involves more than one page, opening one of them in the sidebar is amazing. Simply shift-click to open a Roam page in the sidebar.

Quick Tips

A couple of other quick tips:

Keyboard shortcuts: There are a ton of great keyboard shortcuts available to use. Click the help icon in the lower right corner to see many of them.

Favorites: If you’re working on a page that you’ll be accessing frequently, click the star icon in the top right corner. That will add the page to the list of pages in the left sidebar. To un-favorite an item, just open it and click the star again.

Use cases to try

The beauty of Roam is that it’s wide open. You can put anything you want in there, and you could organize the info many different ways. I know of other great Roam users that would have taken my Steve example and handled it quite differently — and that’s great! Use it how your brain wants to use it, and you’ll get a lot out of it.

Here’s a couple of other things to consider doing in Roam:

Daily log: I’ve been trying to add timestamps and keep track of things as they come up, so I can answer the “what did I do about x?” when it invariably comes up a few days later. Here’s a semi-redacted screenshot from today; the bullets with the gray outline are collapsed and have a bunch of sub-bullets inside of them with more info:

Book and article notes: Here’s a bit about how I keep track of books to read, and then process the information when I’m done:

CRM: While I’m not using Roam as a true CRM quite yet, I tag people throughout my daily notes quite a bit, and suspect I’ll keep adding more info to their pages over time, eventually moving fully to this system.

Spaced Repetition: I use Anki for my daily spaced repetition learning, but there are some solid ways to use Roam for it instead. Here is a good video from Anonym.s on how he does it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmv5Yrnmlgg

Next Steps

So now what? Dig in!

If you want to learn more, you can check out all of the great videos on YouTube from folks like Anonym.s, Shu Omi, Nat Eliason, myself, and even the founder of Roam, Conor White-Sullivan.

If you really want to dig deep, you can check out the course that I’ve set up. It’ll walk you through everything you need to get started in a bit under an hour, and you’ll be off and running. Check it out here.

What about you?

How are you using Roam? Leave a comment below and let us know!

Reading Time: 3 minutes

This is an interesting time we’re in right now. While I certainly miss much of the weekly chaos of dance practice and soccer games, a bit of a break is kind of nice too. While I’ve been using the time to do a lot of reading (in the past month I’ve read Marketing Made Simple, Man’s Search for Meaning, The Checklist Manifesto, Friend of Friend, The Art of War and One Second After, which is probably more than all of 2019 combined), I’m also trying to tidy up some of my personal processes and setups.

The last few nights I’ve gotten back into the depths of spaced repetition. There are a lot of great articles on the subject, but this one from Gary Wolf from 2008 is still among my favorites. I first mentioned my daily use of Anki, a great app to help with spaced repetition, back in 2016, and since then I’ve reviewed somewhere over 300,000 cards — all in about 10 minutes per day.

Michael Nielson wrote a great article about his use of Anki, and had a few useful quotes I wanted to share.

The single biggest change that Anki brings about is that it means memory is no longer a haphazard event, to be left to chance. Rather, it guarantees I will remember something, with minimal effort. That is, Anki makes memory a choice.

This is a big one for me. I no longer have to hope that I remember something. If I want to remember a fact or a quote or a phone number or a face, it goes in Anki. Done.

Here is a bit more about how Michael uses Anki:

What can Anki be used for? I use Anki in all parts of my life. Professionally, I use it to learn from papers and books; to learn from talks and conferences; to help recall interesting things learned in conversation; and to remember key observations made while doing my everyday work. Personally, I use it to remember all kinds of facts relevant to my family and social life; about my city and travel; and about my hobbies.

I also read a great (and very long) article from Gwern Branwen that gets more into the science behind it. Some of her uses of Anki include memorizing:

• Geography
• The Periodic table
• Words from Word A Day
• Memorable Quotes
• Personal information like birthdays and license plate numbers

As a results of those two articles, I made a few changes to my setup.

First, I added in a couple dozen more items into mine, such as the birthdays of my GreenMellen teammates. I know roughly when they are, and I can look them up if needed, but why not take just a few minutes to memorize them? Branwan’s rule of thumb is that it will take you about five minutes to learn a new card in Anki over the lifetime that you use it (in various chunks of 5-10 seconds each). Is it worth five minutes to remember when their exact birthdays are? I think so.

Second, a recommendation that both authors mentioned was that keeping cards in categorized decks was not a great idea. It’s not a big deal, but causes a few hinderances. I had a bunch of neatly categorized decks, but I’ve just squashed them together. Here’s why.

First, having cards jumbled up a bit (a birthday, followed by a book title, followed by asking for the date of DDay) has two benefits:

1. There is some science that shows better memorization when you have to recall the cards out of context, because it better mimics the real world.
2. It can cause some interesting (random) correlations to develop at times, when two unrelated cards appear after one another but you can make a new connection between them. This is similar to the reason I’m using Roam Research for most of my note-taking these days.

As a result, I took a handful of separate decks that I have (book info, Bible trivia, enneagram numbers, and others) and put them into a single deck called “stuff”. Everything is in there and I can just go through it each day. This will save me a bit of time, too, as I can simply work through the cards in one pass instead of having to go in and out of a handful of decks each day.

I’ll admit that tools like Anki are probably most appealing to folks like us Enneagram 5’s (the “investigator”), but I think most people could find some value from it. If nothing else, check out that great article from Gary Wolf that I mentioned and see what you think.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I just finished reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. It interested me because over the past month or so I’ve really begun to focus better on my note-taking. This applies to books I’ve read, sermons at church, meetings with clients, videos I watch — any situation where I want to gain knowledge, I’m trying to take better notes.

It’s to the point now where I feel I’ve really missed out on previous experiences, as the knowledge I gained from books I read years ago is simply gone. In the book, Ahrens says:

And more often than not, reading is not accompanied by taking notes, which is, in terms of writing, almost as valuable as not having read at all.

Oops.

As I’ve read about various ways to keep notes, the concept of a “Zettelkasten” kept coming up.

Zettelkasten

I first heard about the idea of a Zettelkasten years ago, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to Roam Research last month that I felt inspired to dig back in.

The basic idea of a Zettelkasten is a system where every idea/note is a separate card in a slip-box, and all of those cards are linked to one another. It was popularized by German sociologist Nicklas Luhmann, who had roughly 90,000 cards in his system when he passed away in 1998.

For a quick read that goes a bit deeper into the Zettelkasten, I encourage you to check out this article by David B. Clear.

Roam Research

As I mentioned above, I’ve been using Roam Research pretty heavily for about a month now, as it’s a pretty solid digital tool to create a Zettelkasten. Here is a quick video overview of how I’m using it:

As I mention in the video, this blog post from Nat Eliason is an excellent overview of Roam Research.

How to Take Smart Notes

So onto Sonke’s book. As a general rule, the book walks very deeply through the concepts behind the Zettelkasten while remaining platform agnostic — he talks a lot about physical cards, but also how they could be used in a digital tool. Here are some of my highlights from his book:

When talking about why most note-taking is so bad, he said:

There is another reason that note-taking flies mostly under the radar: We don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly.

Part of the beauty of the Zettelkasten is letting notes find one another, rather than determining some pre-set categories or tags. Here’s why:

They sort their notes by topics and sub-topics, which makes it look less complex, but quickly becomes very complicated. Plus, it reduces the likelihood of building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves, which means a trade-off between its usability and usefulness.

To the extent possible, you shouldn’t fill your notes with copies of what you hear. You should translate what you hear into your own words, and then save that (with a reference back to the original source, when possible).

Here’s a quick video from Dr. Jordan Peterson that explains that further:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_d7DdNzkLw

In the book, Ahrens breaks the idea of notes into a few types, including “fleeting” notes (quick thoughts on something to do) and “permanent” notes, that should ultimately live in your Zettelkasten. Here’s his key to how to write permanent notes:

Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.

This next thought of his kind of points back to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and only thinking about cat food once.

We also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That’s right: The brain doesn’t distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads.

Another thought on why simply writing down quotes won’t help much:

As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed. This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas, but never a coherent thought.

A few years back, I wanted to learn more about how the GDPR might affect our clients. To force myself to learn, I posted a Meetup about it that I’d have to prepare for, and it worked well. In creating slides and content for the Meetup, I learned quite a lot about the GDPR. It turns out Richard Feynman had a similar theory:

Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that he could only determine whether he understood something if he could give an introductory lecture on it.

In the end, Ahrens summarized the idea like this:

And that is the very good news at the end. The slip-box is as simple as it gets. Read with a pen in your hand, take smart notes and make connections between them. Ideas will come by themselves and your writing will develop from there. There is no need to start from scratch. Keep doing what you would do anyway: Read, think, write. Just take smart notes along the way.

Read the book, or watch this video

I encourage you to read the book for yourself, but Ahrens has given us a nice shortcut. He often speaks about the book, and those talks are a pretty good overview of what’s in there.

Here’s a talk he gave in 2018 that was a solid look at the concept:

https://vimeo.com/275530205

For me, I’m pouring as much as I can into Roam to help build up my collection of notes, and I’ll likely revisit old books I’ve read with this new mindset to help fill out that collection.

Do you have a system for taking notes?